East is East

afternoon sun. Turco never even turned his head. He just stood there, inches from Ruth, veins jumping in his neck, his eyes locked on hers, “it’ll work,” he said. “Trust me.”

Ruth gave him a serene smile. Turco and Abercorn. They were incompetents, clowns, and they had about as much chance of catching Hiro as Laurel and Hardy might have had. They would be one more diversion for her, one more wedge to drive between the colony and Jane Shine, one more vehicle on which Ruth could hitch a ride. They’d poke around for a few days and find nothing. Not a trace. And each night, while Sax was engaged elsewhere, she’d bat her eyes at Abercorn, the poor idiot, and console him and sympathize with him and stick her finger in her cheek and offer all sorts of helpful suggestions. Had he looked in Clara Kleinschmidt’s closet? The sheriff’s henhouse?

“You’re right,” she said finally, “I’m sure it will.” And then, as she floated away from him and started up the stairs, she paused a moment to glance over her shoulder. “Good hunting,” she said, and it was real struggle to keep a straight face, “—isn’t that what they say?”

Yes, she could feel it, things were looking up.

And then, suddenly and without warning, everything came crashing down again.

It was the night after Abercorn and Turco’s arrival, a night that followed a day on which the artists of Thanatopsis House barely advanced their various projects. They were restive, preoccupied, unable to focus or concentrate. An easterly breeze had held steady throughout the day and the whole island seemed newly created from the sea; breakfast had been giddy, lunch forever in coming, and cocktails—people wandered in early for cocktails. There was excitement in the air, the scent of possibility and romance, the sort of incorrigible hopefulness that accrues to the prospect of a good party.

The party—organized by Owen for the dual purpose of paying homage to Septima on her seventy-second birthday and bidding adieu to Peter Anserine, who was going back to Amherst to lecture for the fall term—would feature a Savannah caterer, a dance band and an open bar. Invitations had gone out to the haut monde of Savannah and Sea Island and to members of the immediate community, as well as to each of the colonists, and Sheriff Peagler and his brother Wellie—the island’s unofficial mayor—were expected to attend, along with a spate of lawyers, gallery owners, art collectors and blue-nosed widows from Tupelo Shores Estates and Darien. A photographer was coming down from Savannah to cover the event for the Star’s society page. And the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, a onetime resident, was expected to phone. For Thanatopsis, it was the event of the year.

Ruth had been saving an outfit for the occasion, a calf-length black chiffon dress with a lace ruffle at the hip, and a pair of new black pumps. It was a little heavy for the season, maybe—she’d been planning to wear it in the fall—but it was late August, the breeze had cooled things down and she really didn’t have anything else—and it was a Geoffrey Beene, though she’d gotten it for a song. She’d spent the afternoon quizzing Hiro on Japan—Was it true that steak cost thirty dollars a pound? did he feel awkward using a fork? did they really pay people to squeeze you onto the train?—and then she left him early. “I’ll be back in the morning,” she said. “Lie low. I’ll bring you some treats from the party.” And to his inevitable question, she replied: “Soon.”

She took a long soak, spent half an hour on her nails. Sax and Sandy were planning to wear tuxedos—the rest would make do with skinny ties and polyester. There would be champagne—good champagne, Bollinger and Perrier-Jouet. Caviar. Lobster. Oysters from Brittany. Ruth groomed herself as if she were preparing for battle, lingering over each detail, seeking the sort of perfection that would make her impervious, invincible—and all the while she was aware that on the other side of the wall, Jane Shine was doing the same. Twice Saxby came for her and twice she turned him away. She moussed her hair, brushed on hiliter and blusher, did her eyes. When Sax knocked the third time, she told him to go on ahead without her—she’d be ready when she was ready.

The party was an hour and a half old when Ruth made her entrance. She crossed the lawn to the strains of the band playing some sort of Brazilian music—a samba or a bossa nova or something—and the crash of excited voices rose up to engulf her. The tent they’d erected over the dance floor was pitched high and it was open on all sides to the breeze, and as she came up the walk, Ruth could see constellations of Japanese lanterns slowly revolving around the big aluminum stanchions that supported it. She stepped through a bower entwined with cut roses and a black man in black tie and white gloves offered her a glass of champagne from a tray bristling with them. Tara, she thought. The Old South. It was like something out of Gone With the Wind.

In the next moment, she saw how wrong she was.

If she’d pictured herself sauntering in to applause and whistles and the flare of flashcubes, Scarlett O’Hara herself, she was disappointed. It was almost as if she were at the wrong party—she didn’t recognize anyone. She stood there a moment in the entranceway, getting her bearings, one bare elbow planted in her palm, her wrist elegantly cocked beneath the stem of the glass. Most of the women looked as if they’d bought their gowns by the yard and the men seemed to be stuffed into shirts and jackets several sizes too small for them. Red was the prevailing color for faces, bald spots and exposed shoulders and arms, and the hair color of choice was white. Ruth had expected something magical—or at least something elegant—and instead she’d wandered into the geriatric ball at the 4-H fairgrounds.

She exchanged her empty glass for a full one and moved toward the dance floor, hoping to run into some of the Thanatopsis crowd—or at least someone under sixty. Sidestepping an elderly woman with an aluminum walker and shouldering her way through a group of wispy-haired men with cloying accents and expensive suits—lawyers, she guessed—she found herself on a collision course with Clara Kleinschmidt and Peter Anserine. They were standing together, hunched forward over glasses of champagne and napkins which held some sort of canape, taking quick hungry bites and talking at the same time. Clara’s eyes were moist. She was wearing a long-sleeved, floor- length gown with padded shoulders and a sweep of rhinestones across the breast. From the waist up, it looked like a Russian military uniform.

“Clara, Peter,” Ruth said, inserting herself between them, “wonderful party, no?”

“Oh, hello,” Peter Anserine said offhandedly, peering down the length of his nose at her. A bit of egg and caviar was stuck to his lip. He seemed glad to see her—or glad for the interruption. Ruth could think of nothing in that moment but the succulent rumor that linked the two of them—the great divorced Brahmin novelist of ideas and Clara, humble Clara—for at least one passionate night.

“Ruth,” Clara choked, miserably gobbling at the sliver of toast and fish eggs spread flat in her miserable palm. Her wild eye seemed wilder than ever. And yes, those were tears.

“Terrific,” Peter Anserine said, “absolutely. Best party I’ve been to since I left Boston last spring.”

Ruth lingered, taking advantage of the moment’s awkwardness to draw Anserine out, quiz him when his defenses were down. And did he miss Boston? He was going to be at Amherst in the fall, wasn’t he? Was it for the semester or the year? And then back to Boston, or—?

“Well, yes,” he said in answer to this last, casting a sidelong glance at the servant slicing by with a tray of eatables, “Boston is my town, after all. But then, of course, I’ll have to find bachelor digs. To be close to the children.”

Clara was absorbed in her food, hunched over still, concentrating on the tricky juggle of napkin, glass and morsel.

“Wonderful,” Ruth said, “just wonderful. We’re going to miss you here, we really are.” There was an awkward interval during which no one spoke. The band broke off and then lurched into a reedy rendition of “Nature Boy,” and Peter Anserine gave Ruth a long slow strictly noncollegial look. She shifted her feet, drained her glass and sighed. “Well, I guess I’ve got to go find Sax,” she said. “Have a good one.”

And then she was working her way toward the bar, exchanging greetings with people she knew from Darien or her trips to the Tupelo Shores beach with Saxby—looking for Sandy, Irving Thalamus, anybody. She paused to scan the dance floor and take a glass of champagne from a black servant with an immovable face and hair as uniformly white as a cup of detergent. The band had switched to something with a heavy backbeat that felt a lot like reggae, and as the dancers separated from their “Nature Boy” clinches and began to flail their limbs to the spastic beat, Ruth spotted Sandy dancing with a girl she’d never seen before—very young-looking, barely pubescent in fact, but a beauty and born to it. Ruth wondered who she was and felt a small stab of regret as Sandy moved in close, but then Abercorn’s dyed pelage and speckled face came into view, riding atop the heads of the others as if thrust up there on the end of a stick, jerking rhapsodically to the beat. And who was it he was dancing with? The crush of bodies closed in for half a beat and then fell back, and Ruth was amazed to see Ina Soderbord opposite